DoJ: We're not releasing all the files today to help protect Tru.... we mean "victims" lol!

So many Christmas movies I grew up liking seem to have wildly offensive or cynical or just mean-spirited things in them making me not want to show my kid. I'm not asking for super sterilized content but... no wait I am they're Christmas movies.

I don't watch much on Amazon Prime but just watched the first episode of Fallout Season 2 and holy damn they multiplied their ads times 10 since the last thing I watched. For me it was unwatchable.

This is a reminder post that Castlevania Curse of Darkness' OST is top tier CV music. I actually used music from this game in a college presentation about video game music. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy1k...

Okay so Aladdin promises the Genie he will use his last wish to free him. But things get complicated. Which, I get, but why couldn't Aladdin make his third wish then hand off the lamp to Jasmine and have her free the Genie? Jafar took the lamp and made wishes just fine, so why not?

This better count.

I like to learn about games I missed as a kid so I try watching retro game reviewers. For some reason there's a lot more devoted to Genesis then there is the SNES. But the odd thing to me is how they all share the same exact opinions about pretty much everything...

I love backtracking and finding things I missed in a Metroidvania game be it 2d or 3d. Exploring is really the best part. BUT, if you're going to have places divided by a big hub, fast traveling between large locations should be introduced early on.

Whenever a tech company tries to add a new, useful feature, and they need to put it somewhere, I'm pretty sure they bring in 1,000 toddlers, see what they do and what they press first, and hide that feature there.

I'm old and love video games and toys. Favorite toyline is Transformers but I dabble in lots of other lines. I don't love politics but it's both hard and irresponsible to ignore them. Some favorite games are: FF6 CV:SOTN Skyrim Mario World Exp 33 Sonic 2 Chrono Mass Effect 2 And a bunch more.

Instead of starting a post with "I really had fun doing..." or "I had a great time talking to..." then posting a link to some special thing they did, I would love to see someone actually be like "The shit I did for this was HARD..." or "I was really nervous talking to..." I would relate a lot more.

I'm going to say the same thing to people who fight over playing indie games vs AAA games as I did to those that argue over what systems to play on- the only thing that matters is you're having fun playing games. That's it.

It's weird seeing games I liked as a kid be torn apart by the internet. I think the part a lot of modern retro gamers take for granted is the exorbitant price of games from the 8 and 16-bit days meant most of us rented games way more often then owning them. So a couple days of fun was all we needed.

The world is like "Lie to your kid about a Santa Claus- it's magical for them!" The world is also like "Let's have different looking Santas at every holiday event and every movie has people saying Santa isn't real with a different explanation when he is." This is a hard-ass lie to keep up.

Here it is folks- what I would consider the greatest Christmas album.

Happy about Exp 33. I don't always assume my game of the year is everyone else's, but man if it didn't get best soundtrack there would be something wrong... er, more so, with the universe.

It's okay to not like or not care about the awards. This is a safe place. Everyone seems to be pre-jumping down people's throats for not liking them for some reason. Award shows never really seemed genuine. But I do like the reveals.

Are more people coming over from Twitter? I feel like I'm seeing more negative or inflammatory posts lately. I'm sorry if that inflames people.

Here's the thing about men peeing standing up- I don't care as long as you don't leave pee anywhere but inside the toilet. And I have very little faith most men are able to accomplish that all the time, and I have less faith that they will clean it up if they do mess up.

So I generally still like Metroid Prime 4 a lot with my initial complaint only being that you have to scan and rescan things depending on their state and location. Now, though, I am annoyed at only saving in save rooms. I know that's how it's always been but a location auto save would be nice.

Metroid ranking: Just do yourself a favor and play them all.

It's been proven time and time again when one company acquires another company for billions they do nothing but good stuff with all the new IPs and don't raise their prices!!!!!

One of my super powers is I like talking about games and toys both new and old all without asking anyone to watch a stream or a video or listen to me casting pods or anything.

Metroid Prime 4 is pretty fun. I assume they added talky guy because they don't have the same faith in gamer's putting 2 and 2 together like they did 20 years ago. I guess I can't blame them. What bothers me is having to scan some things multiple times depending on if they've been activated or not.

Every time I watch any version of a Christmas Carol in the past 5 or so years I imagine if it were made today how conservatives would call it woke and say Scrooge, an upstanding Christian landlord, is being unfairly persecuted.

You want to know about betrayal? Reading about Sonic 2's Hidden Palace Zone in several magazines only for it to be removed before launch. I spent hours using the debug code to check every pixel of every level looking for it. I'm curious how it was originally meant to be found.

Anyone else want to ask the deli worker what disease the uncured ham has?

Every fandom has its crazy, but the Sonic fandom is extra. You have fans who enjoy fun, fast platformers that don't take Shadow too seriously. Then you have others that think Shadow is one of the greatest tragic, deep literary characters of our time. Then there's a third, very thirsty group.

This has to be one of my favorite battle themes from any RPG. Up there with "Man With a Machine Gun." The character's opening battle animations always just eloquently went with it. www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjiy...

Why did "mouth breather" become such a popular insult? My nose is like: A cool breeze? Here's a lot of snot. Hot food? Snot time. Looked down? That's a snotting. The mouth is just way more reliable.

Not that I'm really feeling the need to fuel capitalism at the moment but boy do Black Friday deals kind of suck now. It used to be like "everything is 90% off and you get a free house" and now it's like "shipping is 5% off!"

Okay okay. I have another. Early title screen images of Eternal Champions for the Genesis/MD showed fighters not in the game. The final title screen removed them. Eventually they did show up in the Sega CD followup.

Sega was making a game called B Bomb (Butt Bomb?) meant for the Genesis that was pictured in EGM back in the early 90s that never saw a release.

Watched Inglorious Bastards for the first time, or as I like to call it, "people poorly lying to people that can tell if you're lying very easily."

Bobby's World on the SNES had no right going this hard on the music for the first level. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeVY...

Between June of 1991 and October of 1994 Sega released 5 mainline, 16-bit Sonic sidescrollers and they were all good and their impact is felt to this day. There was also "spin"offs and Game Gear games. But hey I love this 20 year wait for another Elder Scroll.

So when Amazon ships something in a shipping box, they add padding. When they ship something in one of their ridiculous giant envelopes, they put no padding. I guess it's good that there are free returns.

Can we get back to Metroidvanias being about epxloring and finding new ways to unlock new areas instead of just converting them into soulslike games? That'd be cool IMO.

Every youtuber: "Here is a topic you're interested in. But first, we need to understand a bunch of stuff that we absolutely don't need explaining because I really love talking!"

Being an adult means waking up with motivation to do dozens of things but the world forcing you to do none of those things and then calling you out as lazy when you aren't excited about it.

Here is a simple reason I prefer Playstation this generation- if I don't play my PS5 for a month, and turn it on, it might have an update but that's it. The Xbox X, on the other hand, doesn't trust who I am and forces me through a 45 step verification process that requires multiple devices.

Anyone else playing Lumines Arise and finding the missions to be... like incredibly difficult? Like they didn't test them with anyone but the people who designed them? Or maybe the Lumines format doesn't work well for challenges like this? Or am I just terrible?

As a toy collector I've had QC issues here and there, but nothing like this year. I'm sure for reasons apparent that companies are tightening their belts by laying off workers and using cheaper methods to make things. I have 6 figures from different companies currently waiting on replacement parts.

Retro game thought: Making Final Fight a Sega CD game was a big mistake. Sega could have made a 16-meg Genesis/MD game with all the levels, all 3 characters, and two player co-op to one-up the SNES version.

I had fun watching the first Mario movie, but my daughter lighting up when Mario gets his cat power up, among other parts, made it a 10/10. Now she is lighting up to see Rosalina. Look, internet, you can't keep using the same tired, miserably critical parameters to judge everything.

Well, Lumines Arise is fun and addicting like its predecessors. I am a little disappointed with the music, having really liked what they use in the trailer. The game starts with that but there isn't much past that with a similar sound.

It's hard to trust my precious "Metroidvania" genre anymore. It seems like all the devs working on them just want to overly infuse souls like mechanics because that's the hot thing to do right now. I just want exploration with fun combat and good soundtracks.

For all those that say going all digital and stuff like game key cards are inevitable, well I will say this: we are all going to die. It's inevitable. I'm not going to do anything to encourage that or expedite the process.

I always see little Lego guys like that that I want but the catch is you have to buy the $400 set that I have no room for.

You can say you "rolled credits" on any game, but with Once Upon a katamari, you absolutely mean it.